18,472 research outputs found
A Multilevel Approach to Topology-Aware Collective Operations in Computational Grids
The efficient implementation of collective communiction operations has
received much attention. Initial efforts produced "optimal" trees based on
network communication models that assumed equal point-to-point latencies
between any two processes. This assumption is violated in most practical
settings, however, particularly in heterogeneous systems such as clusters of
SMPs and wide-area "computational Grids," with the result that collective
operations perform suboptimally. In response, more recent work has focused on
creating topology-aware trees for collective operations that minimize
communication across slower channels (e.g., a wide-area network). While these
efforts have significant communication benefits, they all limit their view of
the network to only two layers. We present a strategy based upon a multilayer
view of the network. By creating multilevel topology-aware trees we take
advantage of communication cost differences at every level in the network. We
used this strategy to implement topology-aware versions of several MPI
collective operations in MPICH-G2, the Globus Toolkit[tm]-enabled version of
the popular MPICH implementation of the MPI standard. Using information about
topology provided by MPICH-G2, we construct these multilevel topology-aware
trees automatically during execution. We present results demonstrating the
advantages of our multilevel approach by comparing it to the default
(topology-unaware) implementation provided by MPICH and a topology-aware
two-layer implementation.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure
MPICH-G2: A Grid-Enabled Implementation of the Message Passing Interface
Application development for distributed computing "Grids" can benefit from
tools that variously hide or enable application-level management of critical
aspects of the heterogeneous environment. As part of an investigation of these
issues, we have developed MPICH-G2, a Grid-enabled implementation of the
Message Passing Interface (MPI) that allows a user to run MPI programs across
multiple computers, at the same or different sites, using the same commands
that would be used on a parallel computer. This library extends the Argonne
MPICH implementation of MPI to use services provided by the Globus Toolkit for
authentication, authorization, resource allocation, executable staging, and
I/O, as well as for process creation, monitoring, and control. Various
performance-critical operations, including startup and collective operations,
are configured to exploit network topology information. The library also
exploits MPI constructs for performance management; for example, the MPI
communicator construct is used for application-level discovery of, and
adaptation to, both network topology and network quality-of-service mechanisms.
We describe the MPICH-G2 design and implementation, present performance
results, and review application experiences, including record-setting
distributed simulations.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure
Advanced Message Routing for Scalable Distributed Simulations
The Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) Experimentation Directorate (J9)'s recent Joint Urban Operations (JUO)
experiments have demonstrated the viability of Forces Modeling and Simulation in a distributed environment. The
JSAF application suite, combined with the RTI-s communications system, provides the ability to run distributed
simulations with sites located across the United States, from Norfolk, Virginia to Maui, Hawaii. Interest-aware
routers are essential for communications in the large, distributed environments, and the current RTI-s framework
provides such routers connected in a straightforward tree topology. This approach is successful for small to medium
sized simulations, but faces a number of significant limitations for very large simulations over high-latency, wide
area networks. In particular, traffic is forced through a single site, drastically increasing distances messages must
travel to sites not near the top of the tree. Aggregate bandwidth is limited to the bandwidth of the site hosting the
top router, and failures in the upper levels of the router tree can result in widespread communications losses
throughout the system.
To resolve these issues, this work extends the RTI-s software router infrastructure to accommodate more
sophisticated, general router topologies, including both the existing tree framework and a new generalization of the
fully connected mesh topologies used in the SF Express ModSAF simulations of 100K fully interacting vehicles.
The new software router objects incorporate the scalable features of the SF Express design, while optionally using
low-level RTI-s objects to perform actual site-to-site communications. The (substantial) limitations of the original
mesh router formalism have been eliminated, allowing fully dynamic operations. The mesh topology capabilities
allow aggregate bandwidth and site-to-site latencies to match actual network performance. The heavy resource load at
the root node can now be distributed across routers at the participating sites
Implementation and evaluation of the sensornet protocol for Contiki
Sensornet Protocol (SP) is a link abstraction layer between the network layer and the link layer for sensor networks. SP was proposed as the core of a future-oriented sensor node architecture that allows flexible and optimized combination between multiple coexisting protocols. This thesis implements the SP sensornet protocol on the Contiki operating system in order to: evaluate the effectiveness of the original SP services; explore further requirements and implementation trade-offs uncovered by the original proposal. We analyze the original SP design and the TinyOS implementation of SP to design the Contiki port. We implement the data sending and receiving part of SP using Contiki processes, and the neighbor management part as a group of global routines. The evaluation consists of a single-hop traffic throughput test and a multihop convergecast test. Both tests are conducted using both simulation and experimentation. We conclude from the evaluation results that SP's link-level abstraction effectively improves modularity in protocol construction without sacrificing performance, and our SP implementation on Contiki lays a good foundation for future protocol innovations in wireless sensor networks
Typing actors using behavioural types
The actor model of computation assists and disciplines
the development of concurrent programs by forcing
the software engineer to reason about high-level concurrency
abstractions. While this leads to a better handling
of concurrency-related issues, the model itself does not exclude
erratic program behaviours. In this paper we consider
the actor model and investigate a type-based static analysis
to identify actor systems which may behave erraticly during
runtime. We consider the notion of behavioural types
and consider issues related to the nature of the actor model
including non-determinism, multi-party communication, dynamic
actor spawning, non-finite computation and a possibly
changing communication topology, which we contrast with
existing works.peer-reviewe
Unifying Distributed Processing and Open Hypertext through a Heterogeneous Communication Model
A successful distributed open hypermedia system can be characterised by a scaleable architecture which is inherently distributed. While the architects of distributed hypermedia systems have addressed the issues of providing and retrieving distributed resources, they have often neglected to design systems with the inherent capability to exploit the distributed processing of this information. The research presented in this paper describes the construction and use of an open hypermedia system concerned equally with both of these facets
Scalability of broadcast performance in wireless network-on-chip
Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are currently the paradigm of choice to interconnect the cores of a chip multiprocessor. However, conventional NoCs may not suffice to fulfill the on-chip communication requirements of processors with hundreds or thousands of cores. The main reason is that the performance of such networks drops as the number of cores grows, especially in the presence of multicast and broadcast traffic. This not only limits the scalability of current multiprocessor architectures, but also sets a performance wall that prevents the development of architectures that generate moderate-to-high levels of multicast. In this paper, a Wireless Network-on-Chip (WNoC) where all cores share a single broadband channel is presented. Such design is conceived to provide low latency and ordered delivery for multicast/broadcast traffic, in an attempt to complement a wireline NoC that will transport the rest of communication flows. To assess the feasibility of this approach, the network performance of WNoC is analyzed as a function of the system size and the channel capacity, and then compared to that of wireline NoCs with embedded multicast support. Based on this evaluation, preliminary results on the potential performance of the proposed hybrid scheme are provided, together with guidelines for the design of MAC protocols for WNoC.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
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